boutique handheld discourse has me really wishing there was a homebrew platform that excelled at:
- cheap, widely available, open (as much as possible) hardware
- SDK + simulator that runs on anything
- large community of people hacking on it & sharing knowledge
- diverse, welcoming culture that views games as an art form, doesn't care about the boundary between "game" and other stuff
One challenge is that a huge amount of the resources invested in tooling today happens around the two big commercial game engines, which don't really care about being able to target cheap, weak hardware (and their editors running on it is totally out of the question). A new wave of homebrew engines and tools has been gathering for the past ~5 years, but it still has a ways to go before its energy can change things in a big way.
These kinds of projects will almost always have an air of, for want of a better term, "junkiness" about them. Everything that people fetishize about Apple products is absent - carefully designed branding, packaging, a single company controlling everything about the product and its use. And this is fine; we should embrace this, while being firmly committed to "approachability" as distinct from the Apple slickness that has seized a lot of the rhetorical territory around approachability.
Apple's hardware aesthetics have an almost terraforming effect: the sleek MacBook makes the rest of your desk look cluttered and irregular, their stores feel like alien temples you must assimilate into the customs of. I would like technology to feel more like going down to a local co-op hardware store where a lesbian sells you a hammer you will own for 30 years.
TOO SOON
for some of us it will always be too soon to remember the Apple ][ 😭
@jplebreton How do you feel about the odroid go?
@ajroach42 wasn't familiar with it, seems like a cool little piece of hardware
Also, delicately distress my laptop's surface so it looks like one of those department store "antique" footrests.
@jplebreton My factory refurb Thinkpad w/ linux has that feel.
@jplebreton this is a good thread
But if you pretend you’re a character in a William Gibson story, the Macbook-and-clutter look fits right in.
@jplebreton omf
@jplebreton so you sterilize the desk to match the macbook's aesthetic at which point the quote "a messy desk is a sign of a busy mind" comes to mind
@jplebreton This is exactly why i am super nostalgic for early 1980s IBM hardware. It has both the durability of a tank as well as the grace & aesthetics of one.
@jplebreton A 4u rackmount cluster running BSD. 8u systems for the power users with higher I/O needs.
@jplebreton ah, the irony of how well the Apple ][ embodied the properties you're looking for